Saturday, December 14, 2013

Marvel vs. Capcom Titles Being Pulled From Xbox Live And PSN

Here's a bit of curious news out of Capcom today. The company have announced that both Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 are going to be pulled from Xbox Live and PlayStation Network stores. Marvel vs. Capcom Origins, however, is in the clear.

The last day these games and their respective DLC is December 26th on Xbox Live, December 17th on PSN in North America, and December 19th on PSN in Europe. If you've already purchased these games, you may continue to download them beyond these dates. Also of note, a half-off sale on all DLC is being offered on PSN. Discounts on Xbox Live content will be offered in the near future.

Capcom have not said why the two games are being removed. However, it is largely speculated that Capcom's Marvel license may soon expire. In any case, we'll keep an eye on Capcom Unity for more news.

Hardly! This is simply just the downside of licensing other properties for this sort of thing, and Marvel was noted to be fairly difficult to work with this go around.

What I'd really hope for is for Capcom to one day make a Versus style game where the IP remains completely in their control so that they don't have to wrestle with character rights or what have you. UMvC3 has proven very popular here in the United States and it is kind of sad that it'll take that much more legal hoop jumping for it to ever be available again years down the line.

And this is one of my biggest fears with a purely digital future of gaming. Things like Mega Man Legends not being able to be distributed due to the voice acting in it, or games being pulled for unclear reasons, or online servers being shut down. It's nice that if you already own it, you can still re-download it with no worry, but it also puts a potential time limit on everything.

Yeah, the contract merely expired. There were no real difficulties between Capcom and Tatsunoko proper. The only issue they ran into in the worldwide release was that they couldn't get the European rights holders of Hakushon Daimao to cooperate (which is why he is not in the game we got).